It was agreed that the Monday meetings would continue
through the month of December.

Kevin had submitted a list of 8 points for discussion—these
points were agreed on after discussion surrounding #5 & #8.

1. Digital preservation is the
whole of the activities and processes involved in the technical stabilization
and physical and intellectual protection of digital resources through time.

2. Digital resources, both born
digital and digitized materials, are part of the YUL collections and, as with
other parts of the collections, are selected for preservation by selectors,
curators, or bibliographers as experts on the value of the content, in
consultation with relevant technical experts. Selection should be made on the
basis of both the digital resources' enduring value and the feasibility of the
digital resources' preservation.

3. Preservation policies, such as
this document, do not apply to digital resources until selection has been made
and digital resources have been assessed to have enduring value.

4. YUL need not retain all
digital resources ever created and/or collected. Destruction is an acceptable
stage in the information life cycle; YUL may destroy or delete digital
resources when there is no enduring value or need to retain it (absent a legal
requirement to the contrary). YUL should guide employees regarding how to
identify digital resources that have enduring value or are required to be
maintained by law or regulation.

5. Technically, it is not
possible to preserve a digital resource, the intellectual work, as a stored
physical object; it is only possible to preserve the ability to reproduce that
digital resource. Reproducing a digital resource means to be able to render it
with the content and any required elements of documentary form and annotations
that the digital resource possessed before reproduction.

6. Responsible selectors,
curators, or bibliographers must specify the requirements a copy of a digital
resource should satisfy to be considered equivalent to the original (the
required elements of documentary form).

7. Preservation of digital
resources assessed to have enduring value may include any preservation actions
necessary both to mitigate and/or reverse the effects of hardware and software
obsolescence and media decay. [There should be a statement in the Financial
Sustainability sections that reads something like, "decisions regarding
the application of any preservation action should weigh the costs (in terms of
the budget, technical expertise, training, staff time, resources, services, and
tools necessary) versus the perceived benefits."]

8. The entire process of digital
preservation must be thoroughly documented.

Discussion on #5 clarified that preservation of the physical
object, if deemed important by selector than came under the general
preservation policy and metadata would reflect that some aspect of the physical
object is being retained. We will need to clarify that an 'original' digital
object is not possible to retain; what is preserved is a 'copy' or reproduction
of the original object. Kevin will integrate this into the policy as we
go along.

Discussion on #8 further outlined the type of
documentation.A “preservation action
record” along the lines of a conservation treatment report would be associated
with each digital resource.This would
record both decisions to preserve/migrate and those not being preserved, much
as we record our “discard” decisions.

The discussion on the policy statement resulted in a draft
that all committee members present felt was at a point where we could proceed
to the next steps.

Ann had sent out a list of principle sections based on the
NPO doc:

mission

statement of policy principles

scope statement

digital life cycle commitment
statement

retention statement

security statement

storage statement

access statement

surrogate or substitution policy

financial policy for
preservation; resource statement

statement of responsibility for
the preservation policy including reviews,

implementation
and monitoring, Frequency of policy review

education and training

selection based on needs...

risk assessment and risk
management strategies (monitoring risk)

disaster prevention, control and
recovery

r&d in digital preservation
and conservation; outside relationships

standards and best practice
citations

Glossary and definition of terms

? areas to be covered in related
policies:

content, accessibility, retention
decisions

relationship of artifact,
surrogates, delivery formats, etc.

These were reviewed and it was decided the next areas to
tackle would be the Scope statement which Audrey & Nicole would draft for
discussion next week, Dec 13.This
would be to define the universe of “what” and emphasizing the role of the
selector in the process.

Kevin agreed to tackle the financial sustainability
statement for Dec 20.Future meetings
will work on the Life Cycle statement (going to the complexity of the
resources) and Documentation statement based on Kevin’s point 8.